Founder Story

The main story runs to about 300 words, followed by a 60-word version for a bio box, suggested angles, and Dan's practical details at the foot. Every detail here is confirmed and free to quote.

The story

Asset Giant is what happens when three unrelated careers turn out to have been preparation for the same product.

Dan Huke built it because he needed it. He founded the building firm Blue Ladder Building in 2021, and it expanded fast — within a couple of years, up to 20 people and five or six jobs running at once. With that many staff, vans and sites, nobody could reliably say where the tools and materials were. It wasn't a niggle: it cost real money in delays, duplicate purchases and lost kit, and it cost the firm its professional edge, because nothing makes a good outfit look amateur like turning up to a customer's job without the right gear. He went looking for software his team would actually use on site, and didn't find it.

What let him build it instead was the seventeen years before that, running IT projects and product management in academic publishing — a long apprenticeship in how software actually gets specified, built, shipped and kept useful to the people depending on it. So Asset Giant isn't a builder's sketch handed to an agency; he specs and ships it himself.

And the instinct to build the thing in the first place goes back further still, to the company he founded at university in 2001: Skycell Ltd, making unmanned airships for aerial photography, years before you could buy a drone for a few hundred pounds. If you wanted a camera in the sky, you built the thing that put it there. The lesson stuck — when the tool you need doesn't exist, you make it.

Asset Giant launched publicly in summer 2026: phone-first, with AI that builds your inventory from photos, QR labels you print yourself, and a Free Forever plan, because Dan remembers being the one watching the budget. It is built and run in the UK.

Short version (~60 words, for a bio box)

Dan Huke built Asset Giant out of three careers that turned out to be preparation for it: seventeen years running IT projects and product management in academic publishing, a first company founded at university in 2001 making unmanned airships for aerial photography, and the building firm he founded in 2021 — which grew fast enough that losing track of tools started costing real money.

Angles & colour (for journalists)

• A founder who is genuinely the customer. Dan didn't research the problem; he lived it, at 20 staff and five or six concurrent sites.
• The career path is the hook — but told the right way round: the product first, then the airships, publishing and building firm that explain it.
• "If the tool doesn't exist, make it" runs from the 2001 airships straight through to Asset Giant.
• A builder who can also ship software. Seventeen years in publishing IT means the product is specced and built by the person who has the problem.
• Why the free plan is genuinely free: he remembers watching the budget in a fast-growing firm, and wants tradespeople to be able to just try it.
• Why phone-first: the whole point is using it on site, in a hurry, not at a desk.
• Why AI-from-a-photo: manual cataloguing is the step where every inventory project dies.

Practical details